The Internet is rapidly becoming a global community of information exchange. This growth in connectivity, coinciding with the evolution of hand held devices makes Internet connectivity and socialization a growing part of our immediate, everyday lives. Evolving Social Networks, search engines and the ability to share personal opinion through community platforms are creating an increasing social complexity and a glut of social data and information that is challenging the effectiveness of the Internet's open-source architecture. This requires certain systematic standards that recognize the value of online Users and the information they share in order to provide more meaningful connections between people and information.
Within the context of a single Social Network, most people are familiar with the natural and free flowing exchanges and discussions that tend to develop. Whether the topic of discussion be that of endurance sports, surfing, pets, gardening, cooking, survival tactics, dating, wine & cheese, education, business, politics or just about anything, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to offer comment and suggestion.
Yet there is no standard in place for valuing people and the information they share. Therefore, recipients or later readers of such a discussion are left entirely to their own assessment for evaluating who is and is not a valid contributor. In addition, although there is a vast amount of information provided by most Social Networks, it is often very difficult for a person to discover posts, discussions, communities, or even just other Users who either share similar views or perhaps may be a credible and valuable resource for learning something new.
More specifically, a comment about surfing locations, boards or wax may well be offered by a life time surfer who truly knows his or her stuff, or a land locked person who has never seen the ocean and despises the surfing culture. The simple use of terms related to Surfing by the primary author is not really sufficient by itself to establish the author as an authority, and a simple searching on those terms may or may not result in helpful identification of that author as a good source for surfing information.
As users become more reliant upon search engines to find information, it is very desirable for the search engines to be more accurate in identifying the meaning of search criteria. Likewise there is a growing need for social networks to provide more meaningful connections between people and information. The challenge lies in understanding such an expression as “Hot Dog.” Does this mean the food, a canine with an elevated blood pressure or an expression of amazement? Likewise the word “Jaguar” could be a jungle cat, a luxury vehicle or the NFL sports team from Jacksonville. Misunderstanding the context of association between the terms may and often does, result in erroneous search results.
In some cases, search engines permit a search wherein a first term is used within X words or characters of a second term. Though perhaps helpful for identifying specific documents or articles, this methodology does not scale to groups of discussion, articles, communities or other related entities and still may not recognize the context as intended by the author. Moreover, such search systems are constructed with the view that if terms exist within proximity to each other they must be related—but this is not always the case. In addition, such methodology is focused strictly on the relationship of the terms with respect to each specific document and can not and does not permit a greater awareness of the relationship of the terms in a greater context.
Though perhaps an extreme example, the issues of identifying similarities with other Users or Entities such as posts, discussions, or other online communities may be quite important when a parent is looking for safe birthday ideas for children, advice on nut allergies or other issues where misguided responses or even intentionally malicious responses could pose actual harm.
The frustrations with a single site are appreciated to compound when looking at multiple sites. A User very qualified for a particular subject, say marathons, may be entirely new to a site and therefore even regular contributors may not recognize him or her, let alone appreciate that there are interests in common Nor will this User be able to find the Entities i.e. other Users, posts, discussions, or other communities that suit his varying degrees of interest.
Subsequently the ability to authentically recognize credible and reliable sources that relate to specific subjects of interests not only benefits the end User, but also communities, institutions, governments and all forms of organizations by enhancing semantic and social analytics, consumer trends, ad targeting, market and product analysis, while providing a more viable source for ratings, feedback and reviews.
In essence, the open-architecture of the Web requires a better standard for providing the right information to the right people at the right time. A system that generates authentic credentials and establishing accurate similarities, as a means to filtering information or controlling privacy, visibility, and connectivity between people and information, would serve the best interest of the people and organizations that use the Web. The lack of an authentic social standard has resulted in misinformation, intrusive advertising, threats to privacy, and malicious behavior by unwanted, trolling individuals over open forums and discussions.
Due to these concerns, the Web is still unsafe when it comes to the open exchange of knowledge and information, therefore, private institutions such as enterprises, schools, universities, governments, or other organizations, are reluctant to embrace open social integration that would benefit their cause (i.e. research and development, training, education, job placement, cross-platform communication, community management, social integration, etc.)
Since the Internet is an open-source architecture, Web social organization is beyond the scope of conventional approaches to social organization and this presents an extremely complex situation to network based (e.g., Internet) Social Networking organization.
What is necessary is a systematic standard for establishing online credentials in order to recognize the similarities between the various parts of social networking, i.e. the keywords, the people, their posts, the discussions, the communities, groups, etc., thus providing privacy and safety through better organization between the different elements of the social Web.
Hence there is a need for a method and system of determining similarities between Entities that is capable of overcoming one or more of the above identified challenges.